'Lyrical Terrorist' sentenced

LONDON — She was a sales clerk in a WH Smith bookshop at Heathrow Airport, and when she wasn't ringing up newspapers, paperbacks and chewing gum, she was penning jihadi poetry on the back of used sales slips.

"The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom," Samina Malik, a soft-spoken 23-year-old usually draped in a modest black head scarf, wrote on one receipt.

A judge on Thursday sentenced Malik, known as "the Lyrical Terrorist" for her Internet name and her poems celebrating beheadings, to a 9-month suspended sentence and 100 hours of volunteer work.

She was convicted for possessing material ranging from an Al Qaeda manual to a reference work on "mujahedeen poisons" and bombmaking instructions, which prosecutors said suggested the British-born woman's link to violent extremists.

The case comes amid a mounting debate in Britain over where to draw the line between terrorism and those who merely applaud it. Radical Muslim clerics have been sentenced to years of imprisonment for calling for the deaths of infidels.

Malik was convicted over her terrorism manuals, not her poetry. But it is her verses that have captivated and horrified the public and sparked the controversy over when radical statements cross the line into inciting terrorism.

"It's not as messy or as hard as some may think," she wrote in her poem titled "How to Behead." "It's all about the flow of the wrist. Sharpen the knife to its maximum. And before you begin to cut the flesh, tilt the fool's head to its left. Saw the knife back and forth."

Malik sat silent in court as the judge read out her sentence. At one point, she buried her tearful face in her hands.

She has said she was seduced by the violent preachings of radical clerics as she began exploring Islam and adopted the Internet moniker "Lyrical Terrorist" because it "sounded cool."

Though her writings appeared to revel in violence and condemned non-believers, she never meant any of it, she told the court during her trial.